What’s new in Insights Advisor, Insights Cost Management and in connected Red Hat OpenShift experience

What is Red Hat Insights

Red Hat Insights continuously analyzes and assesses all remote health data from your fleet of connected Red Hat OpenShift clusters. Red Hat aggregates, anonymizes and matches data with its own knowledge, experience of Red Hat support and product engineers, integrates results of the analysis into product features and builds a set of services available as part of the subscription for all OpenShift customers. These services improve product quality and reliability, improve efficiency of running OpenShift clusters, and increase operational and cost efficiency through Insights services available within the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. All these services expose Red Hat experience with OpenShift and provide added value on top of the standard monitoring stack.

Insights Advisor

Insights Advisor service continuously assesses and monitors changes on your Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that potentially affect the availability, stability, performance, and security of your clusters. Insights Advisor generates a list of tailored proactive and reactive recommendations for each of your clusters. These recommendations are created based on Red Hat experience with developing, supporting, and operating Red Hat OpenShift. Various subject matter experts (SMEs) from different parts of the company focus on customer experience with the container platform as well as products and services on it by recommending to follow best practices and to avoid potential issues

Upgrade Risk (preview)

Managing upgrades in complex production Kubernetes environments is a challenging task. Many independent components form the infrastructure and each component has a different operational state and configuration that may cause minor and major Openshift upgrades to fail.

Red Hat Insights team and IBM Research have been working on these issues and are now announcing a preview of Insights Upgrade Risks functionality for Red Hat OpenShift.

The feature leverages Machine Learning (ML) to compare the last two hours of a cluster’s state against the known history of failed upgrade conditions observed in the fleet of all clusters connected to Red Hat via the OpenShift Remote Health monitoring feature.

Upgrade Risks shows you a checklist of known risks present in your cluster including failing operator conditions, alerts, and other metrics, and also provides instructions on how to resolve these risks on your path to a smoother upgrade.

More about the feature in the blog post:Red Hat Insights Upgrade Risks for Red Hat OpenShift

Recommendations

Recommendations are available for core OpenShift components, products and components developed and shipped by Red Hat. On managed OpenShift, an additional set of recommendations focused on best practices for workloads are available. Recommendations cover various potential issues with operator configurations, match high severity alerts with additional cluster information to navigate customers to the root cause of a potential problem.

Some of the recommendations examples are

• warn users about the use of deprecated APIs and unsupported versions of components
• check minimum requirements for nodes
• secure configuration for authentication and autoscaling
• inform about potential conflicts between configurations
• check certificates state on the cluster
• validate configurations of cluster components

With OpenShift 4.13, we’ve added a new set of recommendations focused on preventing issues reported by our customer support team, engineers and early adopters.

• New recommendations to support Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF)
• We’ve improved and added recommendations to prevent upgrade issues in components managed by Cluster Version Operator
• We’ve added recommendations to better utilize OpenShift Cluster Autoscaler operator

All Insights recommendations are visible to you on the OpenShift Advisor service in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console and also directly in OpenShift Web Console.

Recently, we also added a message in Hybrid Cloud Console under the Cluster History tab where all important events from the cluster are captured.

Insights Cost Management

Insights Cost Management is a value-add OpenShift Container Platform service that enables customers to better understand and track costs for clouds and containers. It is available In the Hybrid Cloud Console . Cost Management simplifies management of resources and costs and provides a single pane of glass for all your cloud and on-premise OpenShift spending across various environments including Red Hat Container platforms such as OpenShift Container Platform, OpenShift Dedicated, Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO).

The Cost Management service allows you to visualize, understand and analyze the use of resources and costs, forecast your future consumption and compare them with budgets.

Documentation:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/cost_management_service

Resource Optimization (preview)

Red Hat is integrating Cost Management with a new Resource Optimization feature to not only enable IT Governance with cost reporting but to also provide a better way for developers to maximize resources with recommendations. Resource Optimization for OpenShift provides an optimization perspective at the container level, so Red Hat OpenShift users can get the most out of their subscriptions. Recommendations at a higher level of abstraction will be added over the coming months.

Using historical and current data, Resource Optimization scores each of the resource parameters and recommends the right size of OpenShift clusters through all the segments of the applications lifecycle. It provides visibility into how much cloud resources actually cost, what’s not being used efficiently, and then recommends ways to optimize usage ⎯ this may mean cutting spend, but it may also mean increasing spend to help an application perform better. Guidance is specific and time-oriented, so developers know exactly what actions to take and when based on data from up to 15 days back.

Learn more about this feature in the blog post - Red Hat Insights brings Resource Optimization to Red Hat OpenShift.

Cost of running OpenShift

User workloads running on OpenShift do not run on thin air but on clusters which have a control plane and a worker plane. The worker plane always has some spare capacity (typically 20-50%) and the control plane is required to manage the worker plane.

Both the control plane and the spare (unallocated) capacity of the worker cost money, which someone has to pay. Some organizations decide IT will swallow those costs, while most others decide to distribute them to the user workloads. This sounds easy but it is not and few FinOps tools implement this capability.

A few months ago Red Hat Cost Management started to explicitly report the cost of the unallocated capacity and the control plane. Now we have moved the needle a bit more, by allowing users to directly distribute these overhead costs to the user workloads, helping to report a more complete fully-loaded per application cost.

Upload past data

The Cost Management Metrics Operator (CMMO) gathers Prometheus metrics from the cluster and uploads them to Cost Management. Until now, the CMMO only uploaded data from the moment it was installed, on.

Since the Prometheus running on the clusters is configured by default to store two weeks of data, we have now enhanced the operator so that we will be uploading all the data that we can find in Prometheus. This means if the user installed the CMMO on a cluster that had been running for some time already, Cost Management will report cost and resource optimization information from the previous two weeks before it was installed, helping you get value from this feature ever faster than before.

This is also useful for cases where the user mistakenly stopped/uninstalled the Cost Management operator, or had a problem with the upgrade. Those gaps have an impact on the accuracy of the overall cost of application. We’ve introduced a mechanism to upload missing data and to fill gaps which improve the continuity and accuracy of reports in case a chunk of data was missing.

Learn more about Cost management!

Try it out, share feedback and learn more

Now that you have learned more about these exciting new Insights features for OpenShift you want to try them for yourself! To use preview features, click the toggle button at the top of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console screen.

We are always looking for additional use cases and welcome any feedback that can help improve our products. Please submit your suggestions through the feedback form in the  Red Hat Customer Portal.

Here are some additional resource to learn more about these features and also about Red Hat Insights

• More on OpenShift updates
• How we build better products with Red Hat Insights
• Upgrade risk assessment for Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat Insights brings Resource Optimization to Red Hat OpenShift